“... the great liner Queen Mary, which was almost as much a ‘constancy’ in the national life as the lady after whom the vessel was named: indeed, for years this majestic symbol of Britain’s recovery upstaged the Queen in the headlines. Anne Edwards makes no claim to have unearthed new sources. Matriarch is simply a refresher course in recent royal ...”

“... heightened her powers of observation. In English country society, ‘the men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as a duty – but they had rather talk together ... they have no notion that a lady’s conversation is better than a man’s.’ She was not used to such attitudes: ‘For some ...”

“... making them verse-offerings and penning whimsical letters. He flirted with female admirers such as Lady Austen: But when a Poet takes the pen Far more alive than other men He feels a gentle tingling come Down to the finger and the thumb Deriv’d from Nature’s noblest part ... This was as near as his timidity ever allowed him to come to an erection. In ...”

“... There was some clutching, a side-table was knocked over and a curl escaped from under the lady’s lace cap. The man hadn’t decided how to arrange his features before the situation was at an end. The lady maintained an air of gloomy consternation throughout. The girl in the outdoor pair is petite, and her ...”

“... whom you hardly know. You have strong feelings but they should be turned towards Our Lord and Our Lady.’ By the end of 1930 the Monday visits came to an end, but there were a few more meetings in church and even a few more drawings pressed into Véra’s unwilling hands. Véra promised that she would always pray for Gwen and Gwen retired to her shed, to ...”

“... of a safer place for Radji. But even here he comes under fire. Sitting next to him is the doughty Lady Bowker: ‘I hate the Shah, Radji, I hate him.’ Toppling monarchs seem subject to a special kind of cartographic derangement: their world map is made up only of monarchies, all of them dominoes. The most acute sufferer from tunnel royal vision would seem ...”

“... called ‘Thyrza’. Yet truly catastrophic figures in the unfolding drama of Byron’s life, like Lady Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke (the poet’s wife), and Augusta, come and go in the book with great rapidity; when they do appear they figure not primarily for their own sakes and in their own right, but more as knowers or not-knowers, as divulgers or ...”

“... else saw her being picked up off the pavement outside the Arts Council. At a French Embassy party Lady Gladwyn saw her sink to the floor. Clark was there with his daughter and said: ‘Mamma’s fallen down.’ They both laughed a little, presumably to hide their embarrassment, a state of mind with which Clark must have been familiar since Jane was said to ...”

“... be found to mitigate a flagrant miscarriage of justice, and thus make some restitution to an old lady whose courage, dignity and faith in her husband’s innocence have never ...”

“... quality. Lodge is capable of writing a routine sentence – ‘In the meantime, the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover gave a great impetus to the onset of the Permissive Society’ – and of dropping a critical issue just when it gets difficult. He says, for instance, that it’s ‘very important to decide whether Capote’s “Handcarved ...”

“... Hofmannsthal seemed to oppose the match, Dee wrote: ‘Wish somebody would poison that f––ing Lady L. von H … She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.’ Another of his exes published a book, which ...”

“... his Lennon glasses and streaming down his face. Still, he is in better shape than the bloodied old lady lying flat out on the sidewalk, one eye swollen shut, while everyone else gets an eyeful of the incident.) We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winogrand wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how ...”

“... A section on women, birds and feathers moves from Cecil Beaton’s designs for My Fair Lady, to Simone de Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée, to Hitchcock’s The Birds, to Rubens and Correggio’s paintings of Leda and the swan, to Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter collection of 2001, to Wuthering Heights (I’ll stop there). In ‘Pockets, Purses ...”

“... they won’t be another May. How to make that case? By frantically channelling their inner iron lady. ‘Dominic is the male Thatcher,’ Raab’s supporters will tell anyone who’ll listen. ‘Like Thatcher, he is “unyielding”,’ one former cabinet minister said. What this seems to mean is that he will keep hammering away until he gets his way. Raab ...”

“... Sir Wyndham Braddock, ‘His Majesty’s Resident in the Combined Punjab States’, and his wife, Lady Aurelia. ‘Had it been at all possible, Sir Wyndham would have cancelled’ – the ‘situation in the Punjab is worsening’ after Colonel Dyer’s ‘action at Amritsar’. (Could Dyer have foreseen that he would become a stock minor character, not in ...”